Wednesday, May 05, 2010

It's a small, small world

On Friday, my daughter, the DH and I made our way to Denver to attend the Denver National Quilt Festival V

I had never been to one of these before, and I was totally impressed -- sure it's pricey to attend, but if you live close enough you can go four days on one admission price, which would make it really reasonable

There are a lot of workshops if you have the time and money to attend those too

Let me tell you, the quilts were AMAZING!!

They had 2009 Hoffman quilts on display, which was a really great thing for me to see since I'm working on a piece for the 2010 competition -- in some of them you really had to know what the challenge fabric looked like to find it in the designs -- encouraging since I've also cut the stuff up into little pieces for my design

As we were viewing the last of the displays, before getting into the vendor area, I stopped and had a long chat with one of the Colorado,Wyoming & Utah representatives of the Studio Art Quilt Association.

I'd been looking at the quilts made by their members and saying "I need to be part of that"

They don't make it all that difficult to be a member -- they don't make you jump through hoops and be "approved" by the rest of the membership (unlike some other art groups) -- they want new members and they want to help them grow and share

At first I was going to just take their brochure and think about joining "another day" -- after all, it does cost $60 a year

But I know myself -- if I take the brochure and carry it home I will think about it and yearn to do it and it will never happen because something else will need to be paid for and "another day" will become "another year" which will become never

I filled in the form at the show and used some of the money I just raised selling things on eBay that I was going to try to not touch until there was some "special occasion" (which is my grandmother speaking in my head -- she, who left behind drawers and drawers full of brand new slips and linens -- including pillow cases that had been a gift to her at her wedding and were never used in over 50 years!)

Ok, so now that I've actually spent the money, I will "guilt" myself in other ways if I don't do something about using what I've paid for -- and now I can't wait to get my "welcome packet" which will include the password to the "members only" section of the website (which is here if you want to go see it for yourself). In that area there is the "University" which includes a lot of the association's accumulated knowledge.

And I find that there are other groups in the Denver/Loveland/Longmont area -- in fact the woman that I talked to lives in Berthoud -- also close to that area -- and I've been invited to visit their meetings.

So, as if all that weren't enough excitement for the day, as we're walking through the vendor area, we went into a little booth that was selling quilt batts. The vendor was from Ogden, UT, which is one of the many places I've lived.

We stopped to chat with the vendors (you can check out their website here) and noticed that their last name was the same as one of the DH's cousins. So we chatted some more and in short order I found myself on the vendor's cell phone talking to the DH's cousin -- the vendor is married to the brother of the DH's cousin's husband (got all that?)!